I had just one job…

COVID kicks like a mule, which is why I failed at my goal, and why I’m just getting this information out about my next session of classes.

Oops.

I set out two weeks ago on an impromptu excursion with my son to West Yellowstone, Montana. We would look at geysers in the snow, and celebrate his Prius clicking over 300,000 miles, which we calculated would happen somewhere on the NYS Thruway as we returned to Albany, NY.

I was last in Yellowstone 26 years ago with a baby in a backpack saying “bub-ble”. On this trip, her younger brother was more erudite. He’s a newly-minted geologist. I now know more about the Yellowstone Supervolcano than I ever thought possible.

Coyote at Yellowstone, photo courtesy Dwight Perot.

On Monday of last week, my husband told me he had COVID. I was starting to develop cold symptoms myself, but according to the CDC we’d been apart too long for me to have been exposed with him. However, by Tuesday morning, it was apparent that my son and I also had COVID. We decided to beat feet back home.

If you’re not feeling well, a car provides a strange insulation. You stop at roadside rest stops, you eat fast food, you sleep, and then you do it all over again. It’s amazing how fast you can travel 2600 miles when you’re self-quarantined.

Yellowstone in the snow, photo courtesy Dwight Perot.

One problem became evident as we approached Ohio. We would be 55 miles short of our 300,000-mile goal. “No problem,” I said. “We’ll just take a fast run up the Northway when we get back to Albany.”

Except that we couldn’t. Even in its Omicron form, COVID has a wicked kick. I left the boy on his sickbed, drove home and slept all weekend.

Yellowstone River, photo courtesy Dwight Perot.

That’s why I’m just getting around to telling you about my openings for my next session of Zoom classes. There are three seats open in each class. (My current students always have first dibs on returning.)

These classes are open to intermediate painters in watercolor, acrylics, pastels and oils. What do I mean by that? You have a basic understanding of how to apply paint, but want to learn more about how to paint boldly, use fresh, clean color, build commanding compositions, and draw the eye through your paintings. (If you need a beginner class, contact me and I’ll put you in contact with some excellent teachers.)

The great thing about Zoom classes is that they’re one place you can’t spread a virus. And having just done COVID myself, I think that’s an awesome thing.

ZOOM Tuesday morning Session

We meet on Tuesdays from 10 AM to 1 PM EST, on the following dates:

February 22

March 1, 8, 15, 29 (off week of March 21 for Sedona workshop)

April 5 

ZOOM Monday evening Session

We meet on Mondays from 6 to 9 PM EST, on the following dates:

February 21, 28

March 7, 14, 28 (off week of March 21 for Sedona workshop)

April 4

For more information, see here.

Snowdrifts and shadows

A world without shadows is disconcerting; objects seem to float in space. Shadows give objects form and ground them.

My son Dwight Perot took this photo of the Wyoming night sky last year at this time. It's almost like this winter jaunt down US 90 is getting to be a habit.

It’s a balmy -2° F as I type this on Thursday afternoon in Blue Earth, Minnesota. These are temperatures we don’t typically encounter in the northeast, where our idea of deep cold is somewhat warmer. But it is, as they say, a dry cold. It’s miserable.

The Prius is ticking along quite beautifully, although we seem to have lost the front valance and lower grill somewhere in that snowstorm in Ohio. It was a typical winter storm, dumping about a foot of powder in Chicago, but it was preceded by a warm front which made wicked ice. That effectively encased the car, necessitating a quick windshield-wiper swap today. A few minutes without our gloves on, trying to manhandle the frozen clips loose, and our fingers were frozen.

The trucks follow each other into the median like lemmings. I rapidly lost count of the wrecks along the Indiana Toll Road. It was just the same last year.

“There’s nothing to paint in the Midwest,” is a lament I sometimes hear, and one I adamantly disagree with. The sky is so spacious and the earth so flat that all spatial relationships are upended.

In the tropics, the summer solstice sun sits directly overhead at noon for just two days a year. The only American state that experiences this is Hawaii; the rest of us are too far north. A world without shadows is disconcerting; objects seem to float in space. Shadows give objects form and ground them.

Here in the north, the drifting snow drops down along the roadside, creating a curling ribbon of blue shadow that plays against the golden light of the sun. I’m not here to paint, but if I were, I’d stop and paint that.

The ice storm shredded what was left of Dwight's windshield wipers, necessitating a quick change.

There are solitary farms set within copses of trees, and power lines marching resolutely toward the horizon. A windsock is frozen in the last storm’s position.

The snow isn’t deep. Its surface is marbleized like sand dunes. That makes sense because they’re both sculpted by wind. But unrelated natural forms also mimic each other. The map of a river tributary system bears, for example, a striking resemblance to a tree. Why is that? Chance? Mathematics? Intelligent design?

Windmills are part of the prairie landscape.

The grain elevators of Minnesota are mostly metal, unlike the frame elevators of the Canadian prairie just to our north. The prairie states and provinces developed with the same cultural, economic and environmental influences, so why did wooden elevators persist in Canada and not here? Are human beings that much more idiosyncratic than nature?

West of Illinois, rest stops become more austere. You no longer run a gauntlet of goods and services to reach the washrooms. But at the Missouri River in South Dakota, there’s a surprise: art and a small display about the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

At the Camp Pleasant rest stop above the Missouri River.

I-90 is the longest and coldest east-west road in the national interstate system. It was started in 1958 and not completed until 1978. It’s been part of my life for as long as I can remember, because the New York and Massachusetts sections are older than me. I know the section from Boston to Buffalo intimately, and that from Buffalo to Chicago quite well. I’ve driven the western section to Wyoming, but not often. The piece from Idaho to Washington is a mystery to me.

After yesterday’s storm, the sky is utterly clear. It would make for perfect night-sky photography, and both Dwight and I have cameras with us. However, we didn’t shoot any pictures. It was too miserably cold out there.

Home is where they wear you out with parties

When your car is too ratty for Buffalo, you may have a problem.

Erie Canal, by Carol L. Douglas

I woke up to the smell of lake water in the air—a uniquely Buffalo smell, and one that presages rain. It’s my last day here, and I’ll be glad to head home after eight days on the road. I can’t keep up the pace of all this partying. It’s the official sport of Buffalo, after all.

Buffalo’s always been a hard-partying kind of town. At one time the bars stayed open all night to cater to shift-workers. There are no more manufacturing jobs, and the bars now close at 4 AM. I don’t know any American city more dedicated to drinking than that.

Rock tumble at the Holley canal spillway, by Carol L. Douglas

My childhood chum Tim Wendel is in town promoting his newest book, Cancer Crossings. I’d like to catch up, but I comfort myself with the idea that he doesn’t have any more time than I do. I’d hoped to connect with another childhood friend, dancer Cynthia Cadwell Pegado. She’s one of my oldest friends, actually, since we met at our infant dedication at Delaware Baptist Church. I managed to connect with my sister-in-law and her new husband yesterday. And I had dinner in Ellicott Creek Park with my brother and his family. When your life is in your car, you meet up where you can.

It’s like this every time I go on a road trip, but never more so than when I’m in Buffalo. This is my home town, and I’m proud to be from here. However, I can’t see myself ever coming back to live. I can’t handle the pace.

Bluebells on the Erie Canal towpath. WNY has its moments of fascination, for sure.

Buffalonians are, in general, polite drivers, but I still don’t much enjoy sitting in traffic. There’s more and more of that in my old haunts. After a sixty-year hiatus, my home town is finally coming into its own. I’ve waited for this, but I can’t say that I like it much.

I followed a Lamborghini down Niagara Falls Boulevard yesterday. This was always a city of rusty cargo vans. Suddenly, I’m self-conscious about the condition of the old Mercury Monterey we’re tooling around in. I didn’t realize it was possible to drive a car that’s too ratty for Buffalo.

I drove to Grand Island to look at a replacement for my trusty Prius yesterday. At 257,000 miles, it’s grown fragile. My best option, I think, is a pickup truck. “That’s a rather extreme shift,” my daughter commented.

After 257,000 miles and 13 years, the Prius is growing fragile.

I’m spending more and more time on back roads. My Prius, while indomitable, has broken two springs. It was never designed for the dirt roads of Nova Scotia, for example. It’s too small to camp in, and I had to have the roof repainted after (inadvisably) carrying my canoe on it.

I looked at SUVs, but they all seem designed more for luxury than for off-roading. I hate scrubbing paint out of upholstery, so a truck is starting to look like my best choice. Still, $40,000 is a lot to spend on a vehicle.

I don't even remember painting this sketch of a NYSDOT tug on the Erie Canal. I wonder where it ended up.

I have one more task—to load my youngest kid’s stuff in my van—and then we can take off. By mid-afternoon, I should be tooling east on US 90 toward Massachusetts. After that, I get to work in earnest. I have a commission to finish, and a piece to write for Saranac Lake, and if I plan to make any money this summer, I’d better deliver some new work to my galleries.

The rest of the story

I found this while cleaning my room today, and somehow it seemed appropriate. I'm really big on making my students do self-portraits; maybe it caused Matt to become unhinged.

As I mentioned earlier this week, Matt Menzies used to prattle on about my falling over a cliff at High Tor. For some reason, he committed it to writing this week. It’s so uncommon to read about one’s own death in advance, I felt I should share it with you. (But I take umbrage with his characterization of my beautiful blue Prius. It’s kind of otherworldly and angelic, that car.)

They were enigmatic times for the odd trio... Carol had all but shed her worldly ties, and confined herself to her studio exclusively. The only contact with the outside world she could stand was the occasional visits from her long-time friends, the in and out of her sharp-minded daughters, and of course, the company of Marilyn and me. Marilyn and Carol had worked together a long time, it seemed, and as the youngest and most inexperienced of the trio I feel I have an unbiased view. Some days the debates raged louder than all the pigments in the studio, and on others silence prevailed. It was Marilyn who could keep it the longest. She cultivated a contagious Zen, painting blissful blues and warm greens. Every image purred as a fuzzy cat beneath her hand: she was as a master could be, although she painted within a calm, simple joy, and not in a pursuit of some masterpiece.

But I digress: it was Carol who burned the midnight oil, studying and meditating on the nature of pigment, the subtle neutralizations, and the high chroma incidence. She possessed a perception unlike any other. I took to trying to see like she did. I would study her palette and duplicate it the best I could. When I asked for help, she would wander over to my painting, sometimes commenting on what was good or bad. With a palette knife in one hand and brush in the other, she would push me aside and scrape away my strokes, replacing them with her own without hesitation, as if to show me ‘the way it is to be done.’ I blended into her process well enough, like a lab tech working on a grand experiment.

It was on such a day, at the end of an especially long and tiring season, that we took one of our outdoor plein air trips. Carol was fanatical in her search for the right angle, the right light. We loaded up the Prius (an awful dull light blue vehicle with the oddest angles) and we cruised down to the Southern Tier. The grey highway cut through and around the rolling green hills, and the deeper we went the higher the mountains rose. The day had blossomed into a drizzling overcast, but, we had come this far, and Carol's foot continued to urge the car onward; Marilyn and I literally went along for the ride. As the Prius hauled up the mountain, I opened the window to breath in what I expected to be moist forest air, but as I leaned out I could feel nothing. The stillness was uncanny, and the raindrops barely tapped my face before evaporating back into the atmosphere. At times the sun seemed to work up the courage to break through, but then faded back into the cloudscape. Blue greens and grey blues permeated the landscape.

As we pulled to the crest overlooking a soggy valley, Carol stopped the car, looked back as if to indicate she had selected her spot, and proceeded to unceremoniously kill the engine. We all sat in silence for a moment, none of us particularly eager to step out into the moistened landscape, but we set to work and made good time in setting up. The painting proceeded for some time in silence, the drizzle dampening all sound and conversation. And as the water rained upon us, the tears rolled down our canvases. I wondered why they wept. My own sadness did not set in until much later in the day when the light began to fade. I concluded my work and I spun around in search of my betters. Marilyn was but a far-off speck on a neighboring hill, lost in a cloud so grey that it twinkled blue, but Carol…

Carol had set up on an adjacent crest, and I recalled looking over an hour or so before and seeing her facing far off into the distance, no doubt juxtaposing some specific tree with another hill line etc. But she was nowhere to be found. Her easel stood as a still as a deer in the fading twilight, an old rag hanging from it, motionless in the heavy air. As I approached I called out to her, with no reply. I looked down and around, and realized what must have happened. As the master stepped back paces to look at her day’s labor, almost complete, she must have backed to the cliff edge, lost her balance, and fell to her doom!

Marilyn had heard my shouts. I quickly ran in an arc but could deduce no other explanation. Dropping to my knees, I approached the cliff edge. I could see nothing but leaves and darkness. Marilyn arrived behind me, and as I peered up at her I knew that she knew what I had just learned. But there was no surprised look in her eye, and no sorrowful tears; only a calm acceptance, and a wise gaze. The grey-blue cloud loomed behind her and her silhouette glowed brown and orange in the fading sunlight. For a moment I thought maybe she had known of this event long before I had come over to investigate, long before this day had even arrived.

Not a word was spoken. We set to work folding the easels, carefully storing the paintings and supplies in the trunk. The gnarled rooted tree on Carol’s painting glistened with a vivid power, coiling upon itself, as if roaring atop the hill, gazing forward upon a valley it could never walk through. We closed the hood, and turned around to face the hilly crests one last time. As Marilyn paused and gazed for a moment too long I beckoned for her to come. "What for?" she called back. "Carol had the keys."

At that realization the road seemed so much longer, and my way home impossibly far and full of obstacle. I was about to sink to the grass in despair, when Marilyn let out a quiet chuckle, and as I flicked my gaze over to her in confusion it erupted into laughter, and my confusion, my fear of this unknown life, was wiped away, to be replaced by a warm smile, and we began the hike down the mountain taking with us a final lesson from the old master.

Painting in Maine is definitely more interesting than falling off High Tor. If you're interested in joining us for a fantastic time in mid-Coast Maine this summer, check here for more information. There's still room in my workshops.